Global Languages and Literatures

He was twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction: in 1919 for The Magnificent Ambersons and in 1922 for Alice Adams. His play Clarence launched Alfred Lunt on his distinguished career and provided Helen Hayes with an early successful role. His Penrod books continued the American boy-story tradition which started with the works of Mark Twain. Early in this century, through his novel The Turmoil, he warned of sacrificing the environment to industrial growth. Yet, since his death in 1946, Booth Tarkington–this writer from the Midwest who accomplished so much–has faded from the memory of the reading public, and many of his works are out of print.
But his memory is fresh and vivid in the mind of his grandniece Susanah Mayberry, and her recollections of him leap from the pages of her book. She recalls that as a small child, before she was aware of her uncle’s fame as a writer, he emerged as the one figure whose outline was clear among the blur of forms that made up her large family.
“No one who met Booth Tarkington ever forgot him,” says his great-niece. So, she introduces the reader to this multifaceted individual: the young man-about-town, the prankster, the writer of humorous letters (who drew caricatures in the margins), the bereaved father, the inspiration of the affection of three women (simultaneously), and the lover and collector of art objects and portraits.
The author of this volume draws primarily upon her own personal experiences, family lore, and letters (some never published before) to portray her amiable uncle. She tells of the pleasure it gave him to entertain his young nephews and nieces at his Tudor-style winter home in Indianapolis – where they played a spirited form of charades. She recalls vacations which she, as a college student, spent at his light-filled summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine – where she met his famous neighbors. During all of those times, Uncle Booth was the keen observer of youth, who created Penrod and friends from his observations, and the teacher o f youth, who transmitted his own love of art to his young relations. While recapturing memories of the unforgettable Tarkington, Mayberry recreates an era of elegant and leisurely living, when on the dining table “in the fingerbowls . . . were nosegays of sweet peas and lemon verbena or geranium leaves.”
Susanah Mayberry shares with the reader a treasure of family photographs including Tarkington at various ages; interiors and exteriors of his homes; her father and uncles as children (the models of Penrod); the writer’s indomitable sister who championed his early work; and his devoted second wife, a “gentle dragon,” who kept his day-to-day life running smoothly.
Indiana residents will feel “at home” with the frequent references to the state and its people. Indianapolis of the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries influenced Tarkington and his work. The city was his birthplace and his death place. He spent a year at Purdue University where he met such “brilliancies” as George Ade and John McCutcheon. Other famous and not-so-famous Hoosiers became a part of Tarkington’s life, and they—along with international literary, theatrical, and political luminaries—reappear in Susanah Mayberry’s recollections of her amiable uncle.

Paul Harris Stores did exactly what it was supposed to. It brought fashion, comfort, style, and functionality to millions of women in the Midwest. Paul Harris' run of 50 years is remarkable because so few retail stores make it that long and so few make it so big. His life and experiences tell readers much about U.S. culture, retail history, and a brand of entrepreneurship that appears to be making a comeback.

A new series of books about girl aviators and their marvelous accomplishments in the air. Roberta Langwell is a heroine of modern times. She wins a plane by means of her remarkable air feats, and keeps the reader tense with excitement from cover to cover.The series concentrates on the efforts of the girls and women who, like their male counterparts, have obtained wonderful results in the air

A new series of books about girl aviators and their marvelous accomplishments in the air. Roberta Langwell is a heroine of modern times. She wins a plane by means of her remarkable air feats, and keeps the reader tense with excitement from cover to cover.The series concentrates on the efforts of the girls and women who, like their male counterparts, have obtained wonderful results in the air.

"Hinds's study makes an important contribution to studies on the early-seventeenth-century novel. His analysis of the two novels is carried out in two broad and important contexts: sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century French literature in general (Baroque esthetic theory, the literary controversies of the time, etc.) and modern critical theory (Bakhtin, Kristeva, Benjamin, Foucault, etc.). The author brings all of these elements together in a coherent, intelligent, and thought-provoking manner

In his book Nation and Region in Modern American and European Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee analyzes fictional texts as a "discursive territoriality" that shape readers' notions of (and ambivalence about) national and regional belonging. Several canonical works of literary fiction have provided their readers with verbal maps that in their depictions of boundary spaces construct indirect images of national territory and geography. Beebee analyzes the historical and cultural diversity in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's, Nikolai Gogol’s, and Ivan Turgenev's competing geographies of Russia and its empire, Euclides da Cunha's ambivalent nomination of the sertanejo (backlander) as the "bedrock of the Brazilian race," William Faulkner's and Jose Lins do Rego's cultural memories of the plantation, Jose Maria Arguedas's novelistic ethnogeographies of Andean culture, Juan Benet's construction of region as both metaphor and metonym for Francoist Spain, and the "utopian" North American (U.S. and Canada) desert landscapes of Mary Austin, Nicole Brossard, and Joy Harjo.

Jin Feng proposes that representation of the "new woman" in Communist Chinese fiction of the earlier twentieth century was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals. Previous scholarship on fiction of the period occasionally probed the thematic implications of female characters in specific works but has not engaged in systematic study of the "new woman" as a figure through a discussion of the politics of the narrative form. Feng addresses both the general and the specialized audience of fiction in early-twentieth-century Chinese fiction in three ways: for scholars of the May Fourth period, Feng redresses the emphasis on the simplistic, gender-neutral representation of the new women by re-reading selected texts in the light of marginalized discourse and by an analysis of the evolving strategies of narrative deployment; for those working in the area of feminism and literary studies, Feng develops a new method of studying the representation of Chinese women through an interrogation of narrative permutations, ideological discourses, and gender relationships; and for studies of modernity and modernization, the author presents a more complex picture of the relationships of modern Chinese intellectuals to their cultural past and of women writers to a literary tradition dominated by men.

No Moon is a book of poems about the powers and misadventures of memory, about chancy intimacies and unquiet departures parceled out as time, loss, death-an almanac of forces that mystify and transform our everyday lives

This fascinating autobiography is set against the backdrop of some of the most dramatic episodes of the twentieth century. It is the story of a stubborn struggle against unjust regimes, sustained by a deep belief in the strength of the human spirit and the transcendental power of music. It is also an account of a rich spiritual life, during which the author has built upon her Jewish roots through the study of Eastern philosophy and meditation. Born in Germany, Eva Mayer Schay's early childhood in Mallorca was an idyllic one. Her parents had emigrated to the island following the Nazi party's rise to power, but in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, the family was repatriated to Germany. Her father was arrested and given the choice of concentration camp or departing for Italy. They managed to leave Mussolini's Italy for South Africa before the race laws were implemented.During World War II, Mayer Schay's parents were classed as "enemy aliens" in South Africa, which led to considerable hardship. Her father died in 1945, after the end of the war. She went through all her schooling and university in Johannesburg, continued her musical studies in London, and after returning to Johannesburg, taught violin, played chamber music, and became a member of the SABC Symphony Orchestra. Defying apartheid, she was fired, later reinstated, but left Johannesburg to play with the Durban Civic Orchestra in 1959. Appalled at the increasing harshness of the nationalist government and by the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, she and her mother finally emigrated to England in 1961.In London, Mayer Schay worked as freelance violinist and was married in 1967. In September 1968, she joined the orchestra of Sadler's Wells Opera at the Coliseum Theatre, later renamed English National Opera, where she remained for almost thirty years.

This book is an excellent collection of the lives of important botanists throughout time. Part biography and part vignette makes for enjoyable reading. This resource was primarily used for an Academic Decathlon competition but I found it enjoyable enough to peruse some of the other botanists I found intriguing. The essays are short enough that you can just skip around to whoever strikes your fancy.

Araceli Tinajero's Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano falls within the present revisionist trend with respect to Spanish American modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The text's uniqueness stems from its focus on allusions to images, artifacts, and thought from the East—primarily Japan—found in central and peripheral writings within the Spanish American movement. The author knows the Japanese language and culture and brings her knowledge to bear in her discussion of modernist writers who, chiefly as chroniclers and correspondents, made their way to the East and there invented/constructed a form of exoticism (Orientalism, following but diverging from Edward Said) while discovering affinities between non-European tendencies within their own American environment and Eastern culture. The result of this encounter was a unique, non-European Orientalism. Drawing on ethnography, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, and travel theory, Tinajero analyzes a selection of modernist texts to show how writing at the "margin" of Western modernism-modernity is at once within and without the main­stream. The examination of Oriental cultural artifacts in modernista texts contributes to our understanding of modernism, of the East-West encounter, and of the culturally specific configurations of these phenomena in South America . Tinajero's concept of Orientalism focused on Spanish American modernism is a fresh approach. It represents a valuable contribution to Spanish American modernist scholarship.

The "unkindest post-colonial cut of all," the Irish poet Seamus Heaney once noted, consists in appropriating, as opposed to expropriating, the language of one's former colonial masters. The author of The Other Writing and the authors studied here do just that, which makes this book doubly cutting. Fully conversant with the critical issues of the current cultural debates, Djelal Kadir goes to great pains to articulate and exercise the scruples with which critical reading and cultured scrutiny might proceed without unduly compromising otherness or capitulating the congeniality of reading and writing as civilizing activities. From Borges's wry speculations on the nature of writing and literary interpretation to Diamela Eltit's wrenching confrontation with the language of gender in a literary tradition that has been as relentlessly patriarchal as its politics, Kadir traces the ways through which writing holds a mirror to itself. Major works of Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Donoso, and Diamela Eltit are scrutinized with an eye to unveiling the writing ghosts that haunt in the writing of these new masters of literary language. Scrupulous in facing the risks involved in engaging one's colonial language and in representing other people's cultures, The Other Writing explores the ways in which these contemporary authors countenance their predicaments as writers who are obliged to pass through the language of their own colonial legacy and literary traditions. The result of these engagements is the impossibility of an unambiguous "self-identity," the impossibility of a writing culture's ever becoming identical to itself. This disjunction, sometimes aesthetically engendered, sometimes historically, socially, and politically imposed, is the crossroads where Kadir's endeavors meet up with the compelling enterprise of the subjects' writing in The Other Writing.

On their summer vacation, the boys travel to the Windy Mountains to hunt and fish. To help Shep's father, the boys agree to take pictures of "real" hunting and fishing scenes, which will require daring and risk. They are attacked by wildcats and deal with foxes. Mysteriously, some of their belongings disappear and they know their task is in jeopardy.

Honoring Wayne D. Rasmussen, "Mr. Agriculture" at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and throughout the nation, this book comprises essays by distinguished authors from varied disciplines on the past achievements, current status, and future challenges of agriculture history.

During the 1920s, the United States, suddenly aware of its potential following success in World War I, offered bright promise to its youth and especially to its rural youth. Harold Breimyer, the author of this memoir, was one of those rural youth- an Ohio farm boy. In this evocative memoir, told in the third person, Breimyer recounts how he and his fellows were encouraged to form high expectations for themselves, and how they fulfilled them.

George Orwell's novels and essays are known to millions, but his character is an enigma: an intellectual, he continually damned intellectuals; a leading political writer, he was disgusted with politics; a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, he despised violence; and an ardent believer in socialism, he had contempt for most socialists. In this skillful study, an insightful picture of this paradoxical figure emerges

Perspective on Philosophy of Communication provides readers with an appreciation of philosophy of communication as central to understanding and guiding communicative action in a postmodern culture. Each chapter provides readers with an understanding of the perspective of a well-recognized philosopher(s) and addresses how his/her work creatively informs current problems and issues in human communication. This work provides an opportunity for readers to engage the interpretive, creative, and ultimately pragmatic spirit of selected philosophers who open the possibilities of communicative content in different ways.

Intended as an introduction to phenomenological criticism, this book should become a valuable aid to scholars of literature.
Part One describes the practical criticism of the Geneva School and of the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger. It also infers literary theory from this practice and then compares such theory with the tenets of Parisian Structuralism. Among the Geneva critics treated are Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Rousset, and Jean Starobinski. The influence of Edmund Husserl on these critics receives special attention. Elaborate background information is provided so that Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Binswanger may be discussed.
Part Two critiques phenomenological literary theory and provides the only English-language commentary on Roman Ingarden's Das literarische Kuntswerk and Mikel Dufrenne's Phenomenologie de l'expereience esthetique. It is deomonstrated that Dufrenne's work suffers a fatal flaw: vacillation between a Cartesian and a Heideggerian epistemology.
Ultimately, Part Two is a comparative study of four phenomenologists - Husserl, Ingarden, Dufrenne, Heidegger - and one non-phenomenologist, E. D. Hirsch. Husserl, Heidegger, and Hirsch are addressed specific questions; Ingarden and Dufrenne are asked the same questions en passant, as part of the more global treatments of their respective books.
The question asked are crucial ones for any theorist of literature: What is meaning? When a text can present several senses, which is the valid sense? What does one do in the face of multiple meanings? What if a word projects contradictory senses? The last chapter offers an original Heideggerian solution to these dilemmas.

Although a self-taught botanist, Charlie Deam (1865-1953) once served as state forester for Indiana and is revered as a pioneer in the field of botany. He traveled more than 100,000 miles throughout the state in his lifetime collecting 73,000 plant specimens. His four volumes about the flora, grasses, shrubs, and trees of Indiana resulted, among other things, in three honorary degrees. Deam's herbarium and 3,000-volume botanical library are now housed at Indiana University.

The Pleasure of Influence is a collection of conversations with eleven of the most important male fiction writers in America today. In this collection Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler, National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, National Book Award nominees Thom Jones, Barry Hannah, and Stephen Dixon, as well as Russell Banks, Rick Moody, Chris Offutt, Stewart O'Nan, Steve Erickson, and Gordon Lish candidly discuss the origin, process, and achievement of their own fiction in a manner that should appeal to readers, writers, and scholars of modern American fiction.

One of contemporary Italy's best-known writers, Dacia Maraini has often been a figure of controversy as author and as cultural critic. Though she is recipient of numerous literary awards, Maraini's work has not received the sustained critical attention commensurable with its stature. Working and creating "dalla parte delle donne" (on the side of women), she had been effectively excluded from the Italian critical canon. The Pleasure of Writing is opened with Maraini's own analysis of women's writing. There follow 14 essays by an international group of Italianists, utilizing a wide spectrum of interpretive perspectives, form semiotics to psychoanalysis, to treat the full range of Maraini's production as novelist, playwright, poet, and filmmaker.

Plotting the Past stands out as a serious work marked by sharp analytical skills and an unusual breadth of subject matter encompassing questions of genre and ideology that are central to present-day critical discourses

Robert C. Kriebel's sympathetic biography of the prominent nineteenth-century Lafayette family weaves the story of four fascinating individuals into the web of state and national history and culture. The family members include John A. Stein, the distinguished state politician who devoted years to the founding of Purdue University; the indomitable mother, Virginia, who pursued a career in the local library when left widowed and penniless; the talented, albeit disreputable, Orth Stein, who achieved prominence as a journalist and illustrator but was also tried for murder; and the sheltered Evaleen Stein, who achieved local fame as a poet and author of children's books.

A compilation of Irving Howe’s interviews during the last fifteen years of his life, this book represents what could be viewed as the sequel to Howe’s intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope, which took the story of his life only up to the late 1970s.
Many of these interviews were never published and have existed only as personal tapes in the hands of such scholars and activists as Todd Gitlin and Maurice Isserman. Others were originally published in such venues as The New York Times, The Jerusalem Post, and the PBS documentary Arguing the World.
Howe never organized his thoughts about the last fifteen years of his life, during which he gained renown for World of Our Fathers, received a MacArthur Fellowship, and became widely regarded as the leading left-liberal intellectual in the U.S. and, arguably, the leading literary critic in America following the deaths of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. During this time, Howe also struggled to redefine the American Left in an environment that discounted and marginalized it. Indeed, these interviews may have particular significance today, a period of new opportunities for the liberal Left, yet one in which it struggles to construct some coherent identity and compelling program.
The editors worked with the full cooperation of Howe’s family. His daughter, Nina, contributed an afterword and provided a number of illustrations and photos that have never before appeared in print.